Inserting records with inactive owners or inactive user lookups

Recently I had to upload records into Salesforce from a legacy system. The catch here was that the records were for an managed package object and the records were owned by people who were no longer with the company. The records were being brought in for historical completeness of the Salesforce system.

There were a few interesting questions which were raised by this

1. Can we upload a record owned by an inactive user?
2. Can we upload records which reference inactive users in lookup fields?
3. since we are inserting managed package object records,
• should the record owner need a managed package license?
• should the users referenced in the lookup fields need a managed package license?

Note: this is different from the newly released Winter 16 feature - "Set Audit Fields and Update Records with Inactive Owners [docs.salesforce.com]". That talks about Updating records owned by inactive users not inserting them.

I created a sample data load CSV and tried these out on my developer sandbox. 

I found -

• Records cannot be inserted with inactive users as Owners. I got the following error from Salesforce when I tried to insert a record in sandbox - Operation Performed With Inactive User <15 char user ID> As Owner Of <15 char record ID>
• It was decided that we would insert the records using a dummy Migration User owner record.
• Records can have inactive users referenced in lookups. I tried to insert a record with active Owner, but with an inactive user referenced in a field on the record. This worked ok.
• Inactive users do not need a managed package license to be in lookups. For the next trial, about whether inactive users require a managed package license to be in a field reference, this is the scenario: There is an inactive user A. There is a managed package object B with a text field text__c and a lookup field to user, say operator__c. Can we load a record like this one into object B though A is inactive and doesn't have the managed package license ?

Text__c,operator__c
'Test',15 character id of A.
The answer is yes. You can have inactive users in lookup references. Also the inactive user will not need a managed package license.

•  Inactive users can own records of managed package objects without requiring a managed package license. Since we cannot load records with inactive user owners, the question of having a managed package license doesn't matter for data load. But I decided to try it out in a different scenario: say a record was created by an active user having the managed package license. Later the user was made inactive since the user left the org. Should the user record still have a managed package license or can we revoke it?

Brief background here: Inactive users in a Salesforce org assigned to a package license will be counted as an active user of a managed package in the licenses section. This article [help.salesforce.com] talks about it.

Obviously we don't want managed package licenses tied to inactive users. We want them to be freed up for active actual users.

I found that inactive users can own records of managed package objects. They don't need to have the managed package license. Salesforce support confirmed this.

Hopefully this helps someone!

Reference:

Set Audit Fields and Update Records with Inactive Owners [releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com]

Inactive users assigned package licenses will show up as active users of the app [help.salesforce.com]

I haven't tried this myself. But this looks about right - trigger to remove managed package licenses when user becomes inactive [developer.salesforce.com]

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